The Decadence Of Diaries: It's All A Matter Of Timing

Ishould keep a diary. Not that I have anything particularly interesting to record but, like the frisky Sen. Bob Packwood, I could hold it up as a threat when the sheriff arrives at the door.

Hello, bosses. Miffed that I've missed 137 consecutive deadlines, lifted whole diatribes from Rush Limbaugh and fobbed them off as my own original thought? "You know, my diary reports how certain big cheeses kite expense accounts, swipe office supplies and spend more time doodling than working. May not be true, but it's in there." Goodbye, bosses.

Of course, my efforts would be but a pea-shooter compared with Packwood's intraballistic 8,000-page diary, which, he lets out, contains incriminating observations about hi-jinks among his fellow solons.

What puzzles me, though, is if Packwood has penned 8,000 pages of diary, how on earth did he ever have the time to put the grope on so many women around him?

Not that I do much, but the doing of diary-worthy material overwhelms the time available to record it in the diary in the first place. Or the last place.

But I am willing to bet that 7,500 of Packwood's pages covered Januarys through Marches and that the scrawny rest were stretched out like watered-down soup over the remainder of the year. That's how diaries work.

You know how it goes. Admit it. You start out the year full of diligence and enterprise. Your diary -- or office schedule book -- awaits, pages akimbo, your attention.

In the New Year's echo, each day's recollection is alive with detail, attitude, opinion, observation, reflection. No appointment or teeth-brushing escapes our early-on notation. Bright remarks from the kiddies, events, offenses and snubs at the office, it all goes in. Before Valentine's Day.

By St. Paddy's, though, things are skinnying up. Where it took whole pages to contain the entries of mid-winter days it is down to long paragraphs as spring is sighted at the horizon. The weather is less often captured, poetical flights are grounded in favor of

terse labels, friends and colleagues roll through but with no more descriptions and characterizations.

As May flowers, the bones are getting bare. Lovely and important days are down to sentences, with clauses evaporating by June, verbs gone -- telegram talk -- by July.

Soon great gaps begin to appear, days go unregistered, then whole weeks empty out until, by the time Labor Day arrives, there is little beyond the notation at month's end, "Survived another one."

In fact, if you were looking to be economical and ecologically respectful you'd patent a seven-month diary and save all that wasted paper at the end.

It is no surprise to me that the Founding Fathers were demon diarists. The United States is built like a diary.

Look at the map. The original states -- the January States, you could say -- are masterworks of detail. Like early diary entries, they reflect everything. The boundaries of states, large and small, contain every attitude and opinion imaginable. Nooks are honored. State lines are twisted to accommodate a hillock or river's bend. Lockbolt Massachusetts is allowed a nick into Connecticut, a notch, presumably to keep it from sliding out into the sea.

The nation's springtime center begins to yawn a bit, just as does a journal. The states get larger, emptier. There is faltering effort, lumps and bumps here and there, yes, but the energy is clearly flagging.

By the time you get to the west, the autumn of our cartography, all imagination is exhausted. States, which back east were defined with a jeweler's fine engraver, now get the crayon treatment -- gigantic blocks, squares and rectangles, as if a child had done the deed. They could have named these states October and November as well as Montana or Utah or the Dakotas.

Surely there are legislators who are hoping that whatever transgressions they fear they might have committed in Packwood's company took place so late in the year as to be too much trouble for diary fodder.

A miscue in January would be drawn out in "Where's Waldo?" detail while true mayhem and debauchery in September might not make the cut at all. Hanky-panky in August is not the same thing, in seasonally unadjusted diary terms, as is larking about in February. Like so much else in life, it's all a matter of timing